


The Grazonil And How It Didn't Exist: A Series of Lectures on Exaggerated Mythology by Professor Bernice Summerfield

by thetransgirlwhoneverwas



Series: Fictober 2020 [3]
Category: Bernice Summerfield (Books & Audio), Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:33:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26798143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetransgirlwhoneverwas/pseuds/thetransgirlwhoneverwas
Summary: Professor Bernice Summerfield invites you to a series of lectures on the mythology and history of the planet Hulon and how reality can be exaggerated to create fantastical stories, using as an example, the most famous of the world's mythological creatures: the Grazonil.There's absolutely no way she's wrong. She'd stake her reputation on it.
Series: Fictober 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1952200
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6





	The Grazonil And How It Didn't Exist: A Series of Lectures on Exaggerated Mythology by Professor Bernice Summerfield

Professor Bernice Summerfield stood in front of a large electronic board that took up half of the wall behind her, expecting to see multiple students sleeping in their seats or pretending to pay attention while watching pirated movies, but instead all of her students appeared to be paying close attention, which was a new one. She had always liked someone having an appreciation for archaeology, and she especially liked it when people actually listened to her on the subject she had spent many years of her life perfecting her knowledge of, and tried to convince herself that everyone here was just really interested in archaeology. She knew it wasn’t the case, though. The lecture theatre was significantly more full today than it had been the past several days she had lectured. Over the course of the last week she had done a series of lectures about how myths and legends can be created and exaggerated based on real evidence, but massively blown out of proportion. However, this lecture, the final one in the series, was the one she knew would draw the most attention.

Many myths on the planet Hulon centred around a character, a creature, a fearsome beast that preyed on the inhabitants for generations. The entire planet grew up scared of it, scared of the stories they had heard, and even when they grew old enough to know it was just a fairy story, they still to some extent believed that long ago, the Grazonil may have really existed and terrorised their planet. Parents would scare their children into doing their chores by telling them that if they didn’t, the Grazonil would eat them in their sleep. Young teenagers would curse their rivals by telling them they hoped the Grazonil would use their lungs as pillows. Even the most popular and degrading insult on the planet was derived from an archaic word for “Grazonil bait”. The world was born and bred on stories of the dreaded Grazonil.

And today, in her lecture, Bernice Summerfield was going to prove, once and for all, that the Grazonil had never existed.

Partially because it was an interesting topic to discuss, partially because Benny had to justify the copious amount of research she did on the creatures for this lecture series somehow, but mostly it was just to prove that she could. Also it would be fun.

She still wasn’t sure how the Doctor had managed to get her this particular gig. Her reputation had spread this far, flatteringly, and most of the staff did seem rather impressed, but taking her up on the offer of a series of guest lectures she had made in an entirely joking manner was rather more than she had expected. She knew that the Doctor was trying to make up for stranding them on the planet for the better part of six months by breaking the fluid link. Again. She was, however, very grateful, and very excited at the prospect. She had been away from archaeology for far too long.

“Good morning!” she announced to her attentive class. “I’m sure you all know why you’re here, and if you don’t, you’re probably too hungover to leave anyway.”

That got some laughs. Benny didn’t know if they were genuine or just polite but she also didn’t care.

“Over the course of the last week some of you may have attended my lectures on how myths and legends are created by exaggerations of real history,” she continued. “I used the infamous Grazonil as an example. I’m sure it needs no introduction.”

More laughs, Benny noted to herself with satisfaction, but fewer than before. No matter. Down to the topic at hand. She clicked a button on the small remote she was holding and an image appeared on the screen behind her of _The Grazonil_ , a famous piece of artwork by Andeph Patrohir, generally regarded as the most iconic and widely used depiction of the creature. The monstrous visage curled in an unnatural way that seemed barely contained by the page it was painted on, the six claws on each of the creature’s five hands seemed to gleam, and the wings that ran down the creature’s spine stretched in all directions.

“I’m going to prove today that it didn’t exist,” she followed, and clicked the button again. A large and intentionally wonky red cross appeared emblazoned on top of the artwork. After a second to let the image sink in, she pressed the button again and the slide changed to show a few bullet points about her first topic of discussion.

“Most of these topics were covered in depth during my other lectures,” Benny explained, “but this will work as sort of a summary of just the parts about the Grazonil itself, and also my attempts to be funny about it.”

“First,” she leaned forward on her podium, “the habitat. The Grazonil has no singular consistent mythology as every story changed some aspect for various reasons, but most of them insisted that the creature lived in extreme heat, hence why its skin was burned “black as obsidian/terrible as the night/endless oblivion/but eyes gleam bright” as written in _The Tales of Intudious_ by Ingman Atrodin, widely regarded as the first piece of literature to include a physical description of the Grazonil. However, as I’m sure you all remembered when walking here this morning, we’re currently standing on what is widely known as an ice world.”

Benny pressed the button again and an animation of a blizzard swept across the screen, ending after a few seconds but leaving snow on top of the text, which she thought had been a nice detail to leave in for style points.

“Now obviously this is an exaggeration,” Benny saw a few smiles from her students and felt more proud than maybe she should have, “but not by that much. Even in the warm season the highest recorded temperature in the warmest part of the planet was 17 degrees Celsius. That’s about 63 Fahrenheit for those of you who use it, and about 173 Verian for those who use that scale. Which is quite high for this climate, but as I’m sure you’ll understand, not nearly high enough to be “burned black” as it was supposed to. And before you bring up how it might have lived underground nearer the core of the planet where it might get hot enough to have an effect on the skin, if it did live underground it would actually be incredibly pale due to not getting any light on its skin. In addition, most accounts say it tracks by sight and hearing, and several even imply that it has no sense of smell, and sight isn’t exactly a sense that develops well if one lives underground in pitch dark, and this is before you consider what kind of underground creature needs wings, and wings is one of the only features it has to appear in just about every single myth and recorded account of the creature. If it did live underground near the core, it still wouldn’t have black skin. It would probably just have really bad vision and very skinny wings.”

She paused for effect to let the joke settle, before carrying on.

“Second,” she began again, “the size. Given that accounts of the creature go back several thousand years, and that it was described as “eating the young of the world/since the world itself was young” in _The Tales of Intudious_ and just about every story about it involves eating children, because let’s face it, parents love scaring their kids into going to bed -” again she paused for laughter “- taking that into account with the fact that there haven’t been too many cases of children disappearing en mass, well, ever, implies that if it was around, its food source stopped being food a long time ago. In which case, it would be dead, and would have decomposed, even on this planet. So there’d be a skeleton somewhere, one would think, correct?”

Some of the students nodded and voiced their support for this theory.

“Well, again, most accounts held the creature as being rather, well, large,” Benny continued. “In fact, _Nradi and the Grazonil_ posits that the creature is, and I quote, “tall as a mountain”, and _Grazonil Fights RoboGrazonil_ lists an exact height of 964 feet tall.”

Benny pressed the button again and the slide changed to a still shot from the movie, a particularly exciting one featuring Grazonil attempting to bite RoboGrazonil in the shoulder to disable the robot’s shoulder-mounted missile launcher.

“Now, I’m not sure we can take _Grazonil Fights RoboGrazonil_ as an entirely accurate source -” again she had to pause for her students to laugh. She was right, though she had thought it a very entertaining movie, it wasn’t very interested in historical accuracy “- we can assume that the Grazonil was, based on just about every story about it, pretty big. Most of the surface of the world has been dug under and while things and history are still being discovered, nothing that big has ever been found, and it would be pretty difficult to hide. Even if we take those kinds of figures as a huge exaggeration, which we should, and assume that the creature was two or three stories tall at most, there is no evidence of any remains of any creature found that is nearly that big on the entire planet.”

The lecture continued for approximately half an hour, as Benny had promised, as she walked through every aspect of the creature as depicted in popular and widely known stories and debunked every single one as she pointed out every single piece of evidence why the famed creature could not have existed. Her students were, for the most part, hooked and she hoped, thoroughly entertained.

“And finally,” Benny started her last point, “the ecosystem. For a creature that apparently flies, actively chases prey, has no hair on its body, or at least not enough to cover up the black skin, and has many extremities as described and depicted in most stories, a snowy winter environment is not exactly ideal. It would freeze, simply put. This point is shorter than the others, because there’s not much I need to say: there’s no way a creature like that could have evolved in this kind of environment. It would have died out if it never found any way to keep itself warm naturally.”

Benny changed the slide to another slide of _The Grazonil_ by Andeph Patrohir, but this one with a garishly pink fur coat crudely edited into the picture to look like the creature was wearing it, which again got plenty of laughs. She pressed the button again to a slide simply containing the text “thank you for listening” across it in large, friendly letters.

“And there you have it,” Benny finished as some of the students started to pack up their things. “The Grazonil could not have existed based on the stories told about it, and there’s no evidence to suggest any creature even similar to it ever existed. All of the stories were just exaggerations of significantly less massive and child-hungry beasts that roamed Hulon and still do, although most of them are significantly more domesticated now. Thank you for attending what I hope has been an entertaining ride through the history of one of the most apocryphal-”

She was interrupted by the door several feet to her left slamming open and a figure running in shouting “Summerfield!” at the top of his lungs, his velvet jacket trailing behind him.

“Oh, what is it Doctor?” Benny asked, irritated at the uncouth interruption. “I’m just finishing my lecture, can’t it wait?”

The Doctor stopped in front of her and paused, bending over to catch his breath, before starting to walk in the other direction, beckoning Benny to follow him. She didn’t.

“Doctor,” she chided in a tone that she hoped communicated that she wanted an explanation.

“The Grazonil,” the Doctor said, still walking towards the door he had entered from and picking up speed.

“Yes, the Grazonil,” Benny repeated, frustrated. “I’ve just proved that it didn’t exist, now what’s the problem?”

“It’s back.”

Benny blinked. Then she blinked again. She opened her mouth to say something, but then realised she didn’t know what she wanted to say. She finally settled on “excuse me?”.

“The Grazonil, it’s back.”

“Um, no it isn’t,” Benny countered, refusing to believe the Doctor was being serious. “It doesn’t exist, I’ve just proved that.” She flashed an apologetic smile to the students who were no longer making to leave.

“Well, whether you’ve proved it or not,” the Doctor’s voice came, as he had now exited the way he had come in, “it’s made a nest in the Student Union and isn’t leaving.”

“I, I, I don’t,” Benny stammered, unable to come to terms with what she was hearing. “No! I’ve staked my reputation at this _rather prestigious_ university I’ll have you know, on the creature not being real! You can’t just waltz in and say...say we need to vanquish it just like that!”

“Well, come along and see for yourself Summerfield!” the Doctor shouted from halfway down the hall. “It’s not going to vanquish itself!”

Benny stared at the rapidly disappearing figure who had just made the last several weeks of her life entirely redundant, a mixture of aghast, furious, and admittedly intrigued. She turned back to her students.

“I’ll make sure you all get extra credit if none of you ever speak of this,” she promised, and took off down the hallway.


End file.
